As I read the history of the Ukraine and particularly Galicia, from whence many of these secret keepers came, I began to imagine their lives. I imagined invaders arriving in a village (as they seem to have constantly been arriving, year after year). Do we side with the invaders to save ourselves or with the defendors? The alliances and allegiances must have been constantly shifting and changing. I puzzle over the simplest of things in my life but thinking of the life and death puzzles they were constantly facing humbles me. My grandparents were so close to the Polish border, so close to the Russian border, but were ruled by Austria and priests who kept Ukrainian culture alive in an underground way. They must have all had secrets that could have betrayed them to those in power or knew secrets about their neighbors that could have destroyed them. I remember reading that the Vikings were actually there (wasn't everyone!) and that they discovered a society with very little organization -- nether state or church -- anarchy -- every family keeping to themselves, thank you very much. Realisticly we would have to believe that there is a pysche created by the living conditions of a people -- I suggest that the same pysche that produces the secretiveness, perhaps paranoia of these ancestors has a very positive side as well: Shrewdness and self-sufficiency are two qualities that fascinate me in the Slavic peoples.